FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Sofia the Witch Curse of the Monster Moon - Demo]

Oh, this was a rough one for me. I really, REALLY want to like this game as it's just so bloody cute and charming on many levels, and I feel like there's been a lot of love and considerable effort into constructing this. While I'm a bit more of an action junkie, I did find the simple low-stakes scavenger hunt-style gameplay where you're searching and collecting friends to be cute and fun. All in all, there's a lot of potential here and it legitimately feels like it could be a great adventure that stands alongside other games like Kirby's Dreamland, Super Mario World, McKids, and so on.

But unfortunately, I found the gameplay to just be quite boring and repetitive, mostly due to how sluggish it is to move Sofia through these arduous and maze-like environments. For such a cute game, it was actually quite the stressful affair, and not in the good challenging way, but in a tedious way. Whenever I fell from a tree branch from a unsuccessful jump or died, I groaned at having to make the trip back: compare this to movement in a Mario or Kirby game, where I'd be glad to zip, zoom, and jump right back to where I was. I also hated having to check every nook and cranny to see if there's some friend lingering on the edge of the screen that needs a leap of faith to reach. It didn't help that every level just seemed to be the same thing over and over without any new things being introduced to keep it novel. In short, the core movement and traversal of Sofia is just so damn unsatisfying compared to other platformers, and due to the environments being so static and large with no flow or fun obstacles, it just amplifies the boredom.

In terms of other feedback beyond the core gameplay:

*When you use the wand to make bubbles, you shouldn't be able to make them within walls, and due to the way the wand currently makes bubbles at an exact position no matter what, this is what unfortunately happens. If you create a bubble when standing close to the wall, it should create the bubble at the nearest open position: it just makes more sense.

*I understand that water is a witch's enemy, but I was shocked when I was killed by jumping into a waterfall: I thought I only needed to look out for jumping into a pond of water, because waterfalls looked like they were just part of the background, not the foreground, and thus I thought I was just jumping past them, not into them.

*When you bounce on a turtle enemy to flip them over, you shouldn't take damage when you land on their flipped state afterwards: it just feels unnecessary and cruel and damage should only be given when you make contact with their unflipped state.

*The save/load function didn't seem to be working for me. I beat the first two levels of the forest zone, took a break, and then when I came back, I was back at the moon altar and the first two levels were locked again. Why did it not save after beating those levels?

As much as I'm harsh on this, I hope, considering this is a demo, that the feedback can be helpful in making this out to be the best it can be in the final version!

jakemacher responds:

Thank you for all the feed back. I'm going to look into some of your suggestions.

Saving is done manually. In your home there is a spell book where you save your progress. After you complete the tutorial level the owl tells you this, and the cat in your house reminds you too. To make this easier on the player if you hit select you can teleport right back home where you can save your game quickly.

The bubble going into walls is not something I can control sadly, it is a limit of game engine I'm using, sprites do not have collision detection like that.

[Spooky Season]

Wow, what a cute, cozy little game! Always enjoy a little scavenger hunt adventure and this delivered that, as well as a quaint and goofy world filled with funny characters and wacky dialogue. I was also impressed with some of the more surprisingly elaborate little touches, like a whole minigame just for petting the cat and for sweeping the cobwebs: not necessary, but the effort is appreciated!

If I were to have any complaints, its that I was a bit bummed out at how automated it was at times. As stated before, I liked that it had a little minigame to sweep the cobwebs instead of just fading to black and fading back in with a clean room. So, when it came to events like having to know a magic spell to undo the barrier or knowing the exact characteristics of the headless horseman's pumpkin, it was disappointed that you didn't need to memorize those facts and be quizzed upon them: instead the barrier is automatically undone when you learn it, and the pumpkin can be brute forced by just picking up the only interactable one. It's fine in the grand scheme of things, but still, it's what I felt at the time.

I was also a little bummed that there is no save/load feature. I understand it's not the longest game, but it'd still be nice to have. Nonetheless, I had enough fun that, despite losing my progress, I still replayed it to make it to the end, so take that as a compliment!

arudasics responds:

Thanks for playing! I'm glad you appreciated the details I spent so much time on! I only gave myself 7 days to make the game by myself, otherwise save/load would have been the next feature I added! Thank you for replaying!

As for the spell, Skellington the Magical isn't the smartest perhaps and actually says the words to unlock the Witch's hut himself. I do like the idea of quizzing the player though, I might add some variation of this in the sequel next year. As for the Horseman's head, I actually wanted to add the ability to brute force the pumpkin, because unfortunately some of my play-testers got very frustrated checking each individual pumpkin. The compromise was to make the interaction area as small as functionally possible so that I would decrease the chances of just bumping into it.

[Featherless-Cake Delivery!]

Hmmm, this was a rough one for me! I really want to like it: the game makes a solid first impression with wonderful graphics and a cute world filled with amusing characters, and the idea of making these deliveries while also exploring to acquire upgrades to handle all the obstacles that get in the way of said deliveries was quaint.

So much got in the way of the adventure though!

First and foremost, the game just feels really stiff and laggy. General movement and actions just felt really awkward with strange delays and ignored inputs: felt like I needed to be overly slow and delicate with the game, like it wouldn't be able to keep up and break if I was to play naturally. There were tons of weird events such as, if you break a pot with a heart in it, the space where the pot is will still awkwardly block your movement until the shattering animation and heart has disappeared.

The game was also rather confusing and unintuitive. Why is a furball projectile, something that's technically very soft, necessary to destroy crates, when you'd think that would be handled with stronger melee attacks? If anything, I feel projectiles are best used to hit out-of-reach buttons or something akin to that. Also couldn't there have been some sort of hint that a sponge could be given to the frog, like maybe having the frog say something like 'oh i can't help you right now, i have a massive spill to clean up': I only gave them the sponge out of random desperation. And why is there no interaction prompt above the bunny cop when there is over everyone else, especially considering how important it is to talk to them?

As if that wasn't enough, the game also descends into outright being buggy and glitchy. I had plenty of times where an enemy would be invincible against my attacks for no reason. I found it incredibly awkward how when you pause or look at the map, when you go back to the game, the level will have reset to have everything back in their starting positions instead of preserving where they were. Speaking of pausing, my game eventually crashed when I tried to switch from the map to the pause menu too quickly, and when I reset, suddenly I was locked in a state where I had already finished my deliveries yet still hadn't delivered to anyone...and my jump was suddenly really powerful?

I think it could be a nice game with some more time in the oven: right now it is simply too janky. Not sure how much of it is limitations of the GB Studio engine, but as much as I can sympathize if that's the case, what feels bad is bad, no matter what the excuse.

Elv13s responds:

in my testing the game i havent encountered any lag or slowdown, unless theres more enemies and projectiles on screen. i dont know if the lag is an issue with the game itself, as ive checked with other browsers/emulators.

yeah the pot/heart sprites share collisions so im at fault for not fixing that part. but i feel like the movement and inputs are fine in my part, will tweak them in the future when this game is gonna be a full game eventually.

the furball is a projectile that so happens to be overpowered, in the future, i will reverse the tail and furball's function so its a bit "realistic".

the hint on the sponge was the frog's animation is he's scrubbing the fish tanks, it was supposed to be a "so this is where i needed it" moment, and the game doesnt really lock you in progression if yuou dont notice it at first, the game is open enough that you can just do the frog mission last, but yeah ill have the rog say lines that he needs it in the future.

the level resets every time you switch scenes because its the enemies arent really killed ion the game, just stunned.

oh there was a bug like that? thanks for pointing that out,

thanks for playing the game and giving feedback, i promise ill strive to e a better dev

[Six Seats Left]

Cute little game! I really enjoyed the concept of picking people who deserve to get the last seats on the ark: might be easy to think "oh, I'll just pick everyone who isn't rude to me" or something akin to that, but considering the situation, I think its understandable that some people might be desperate or rude and that doesn't necessarily make them a bad person or unworthy (and the endings reflect that in some cases). So many factors to think about beyond that as well, such as diversity, "women and children first", and so on: very fun to ponder if you allow yourself to get immersed. Enjoyed the epilogues as well as they were nice to see play out, and I was especially impressed that some characters actually influence others: going that extra mile is quite nice, as you'd expect it to just be all character-specific with no overlap. Speaking of going the extra mile, I like the subtle touch of everyone turning to stare at you as you walk around talking to everyone: really amplifies the stress and importance of the situation!

Only big problems I had was that there was no way to fast-forward text: it's common for games to allow you to press the button mid-dialogue to automatically fill out the text to the last, whereas this game forces you to wait for the text to play out, making multiple playthroughs quite annoying (or even regular playthroughs for speed-readers). Speaking of multiple playthroughs, its also a bit annoying that you're forced to listen to them talk before being able to make a decision: I understand, but it would be nice if you could have the option to choose to talk or immediately skip to decision (after all, even on a first playthrough, perhaps you would just want to choose passengers by random to be fair instead of letting yourself be influenced?)

F1Krazy responds:

I'm planning an update now that the jam is over, and allowing text to be skipped definitely need to go on the list. Thanks for reminding me, I almost forgot!

[The Skibidi Toilet Collab]

I have no idea what the heck skibidi toilet is, but this seemed like a somewhat decent art collab (though quite rough in a lot of aspects, though)!

For the good, I like that this art collab didn't just default to the usual boring slideshow presentation and instead opted for this sliding showcase angle instead. Don't get me wrong, it's still pretty much a slideshow at heart so I'm not giving you full points, but something about being able to slide everything smoothly to the side and seeing the art pieces as if they were statues on a table: it lends a bit more physicality and immersion to the experience and deserves some small amount of credit. The general presentation as well had a somewhat goofy charm to it all, especially with the title screen and transition into the gallery, albeit sometimes it was to the point of being garish and hurting my eyes.

As for the bad...while I can understand a lot of the mistakes I'm about to list off excused or brushed off as being part of some sort of goofy charm, I don't feel the same:

I felt like the text was very difficult to read due to the text box opacity being very low and the art pieces overlapping too much. Furthermore, the text was difficult to read because there were a lot of mistakes that could've stood to have been proofread a bit, and the text wasn't formatted properly and would even bleed off of the edges of the box at times. Again, I can understand if some of the typos were intentional, but still.

There was also some missing interactivity that I would've liked to see, such as being able to click on the art pieces to zoom into them or just have a clearer standalone view of them, as well as being able to click on artist's names to go to their NG profiles, thus making it easier to see their other art and potentially follow them.

All in all, it may not be great, but it's an ok art collab: always nice to see little community events like this.

name responds:

Thou know not skibidi toilet!? thou might not but join from England. Thou are belike settling, what's thy name?

[Quantron's Game]

Hmmm, I just felt kinda confused by this one. Maybe it's my fault for playing it as a single player, but the option was there, so keep that in mind.

While it seems like a decent 2D platformer in some respects, I just felt like the game was very repetitive and generic, lacking an intriguing core concept or satisfying feel to it all. It felt like once you've played it for a few minutes you've seen everything as it just keeps recycling the same enemies over and over and not introducing any new obstacles or mechanics. Aspects that could've been interesting, like the AI partner which you can somewhat guide, or the different world's gravity, or the upgrade system, lack focus and just feel token, not adding anything but just stuck on as if just by having them it'd make this plain game somehow seem better than it is. Eventually it gets some stuff like boss fights but for me that was too little too late as I had already quit from boredom.

The most interesting aspect of the game I encountered was when I died and I was left with only my AI partner, who I could still somewhat guide despite being dead by signaling him to move forward, but he would automate his jumps and attacks. This was a rather unique control scheme that could be interesting and reminded me of games like Gyromite, but it really felt like it wasn't intentional and the way to play. The AI was largely unreliable anyway, regularly getting stuck on things or falling into pits.

The controls felt terrible, in particular with the way jumps kept you moving forward with momentum despite no longer holding the forward button, which would usually kill your momentum in other platformers, made it very awkward and feeling like you're constantly sliding on ice. Combine this with the way enemies can just rush in quickly from the right and smash into you and you've got a real frustrating loop of damage that feels unavoidable.

To add to the pile further, I really disliked the unnecessary scanline filter, which only served to hurt my eyes.

I dunno, maybe there's something interesting in here that could be salvaged, but right now it just feels like an unfocused mish-mash with bad AI, bad jumping controls, and at its core just a rather bland and uninspired side-scroller. Again, maybe if you focused on that unique aspect of helping to guide an AI through the battle, it might be a unique experience at least? Might've been a case where you needed to 'follow the fun', but maybe that's just me.

ImmanentDeath responds:

Honestly, this whole game was just my attempt at salvaging an idea. I wanted to make a generic video game and put my own spin on it. But it was rushed and overscoped. There's a lot more I wanted to add or change, but I just couldn't.

It is supposed to be a game where you just goof around with another player or the AI for as long as you want, and either laugh or get frustrated when one of you does something silly, by accident or on purpose. You are supposed to get hurt and fall off cliffs because losing is fun. I wanted it to feel like you and your partner are in this together against this broken universe.

[BLIMBO]

Quite the goofy and fun little adventure that gives me very strong Earthbound vibes! Overall the experience is quite enjoyable and fun, especially due to all the wacky characters and interactions you can have with them: the world, while a bit juvenile, was charming, and I loved talking to everyone I met, including even searching out all those dead-end gags! Even the graphics, while looking very low-effort and lacking animations and the like, do have an appealing look to them, and there is some good effort in the music and other aspects as well.

Finding new people to talk to and seeing where the silly story went to was a strong motivation for me, but unfortunately, I felt like the combat really got in the way here. It's a one-two punch of random encounters and braindead combat where all you do is spam bash/shoot and occasionally heal, both incredibly archaic practices that I feel should be left behind in lieu of encounters being visible monsters on the map that you bump into and combat being more strategic and with a more defined mechanic, like the elemental weaknesses to exploit for stuns or extra turns, or Undertale's talk puzzles and bullet hell dodging. No, the combat isn't the worst as the game and environments are rather short, and you can find have some modicum of fun grinding it out, but I just felt like it wasn't the games strong suit and would probably be better without altogether, focusing instead on the funny world you've built and adding in quests and puzzles instead. I also wish I never bought that AK-47: it just slows down combat by making you have to always scroll down to Shoot instead of mashing Bash! Why!?

Again, as much as the combat got on my nerves a bit, the game still does a decent job at keeping the pace up, not requiring that much grinding as it seemed like it would, and it was fun to build up my character with new equipment despite it all just being numbers and no new abilities. It also helped that eventually I realized you could sprint by holding shift or clicking to move. Pretty fun stuff!

Tritnew responds:

Glad you liked it regardless of the lil irritation you got from the combat!

I'll keep all this in mind whenever I decide to do another entry.

[Viva Hexagon! Feat. Ipulo]

Wow, quite the cool puzzle game you got here! For the most part it feels very well-put together and professionally made, bursting at the seams with a lot of content: impressive stuff!

In particular, I love how fun it is to move the player character around: gives me Pizza Tower vibes with how how animated and expressive they are which not only helps with making actions clear to distinguish, but makes certain actions, like slamming blocks down, very satisfying to pull off again and again. Speaking of satisfaction, the game, while not overly explosive in its pizazz, does still feature a lot of those subtle touches, such as playing a sequentially higher-pitched sound for chain bonuses. While it is a bit overwhelming to grasp their entire moveset at first, I enjoyed the challenge of getting it down and becoming not only more effective at scoring, but stylish in doing so. Again, it just overall feels well put-together and fun to play!

As mentioned, if there is one downside to this game, is that it can be a bit rough to grasp at first. To be fair, most of the design is rather intuitive and will be familiar to players of games like Puyo-Puyo and the like, but there are certain aspects that kept catching me off-guard despite seeing them multiple times, such as how similar color blocks will stick while others fall, how you need a full shape and not lines or columns of colors to score, how you can't grab blocks when standing by them despite the character doing the grab animation, and I'd just plain forget I had a lot of moves like dashing and attacking.

Similar to that is the tutorial, which can be rather overwhelming due to how verbose and jam-packed it can be. Kudos to making the tutorial very interactive and visual, and I appreciate trying to explain all the various oddities the game has, but it was just so much and that very same interactivity could screw me over at times where suddenly the text would move onto something else when I wasn't done reading it. If I were to have a suggestion, it would be to have the tutorial not be a single huge overwhelming sequence, but several split-up chapters, some for very basic gameplay and others for advanced techniques and special cases: a player could just do the basic chapters and get into play faster, coming back to the advanced chapters if they spot something confusing when playing, and it'd be much easier to just look up something specific without having to do everything from the start. In addition to that, I think there were a lot of cases where text could be more concise or replaced with a picture, or split up into separate pages to make it look less dense, and some things are just so obvious you don't need to waste time explaining.

Still, the initial process of learning the game, while it could be improved, wasn't that bad and it wasn't too long before I got into the game and had a bunch of fun!

zeddy1267 responds:

Thanks for your kind words! The movement is definitely the part I care most about, since I do really enjoy platformer's that play well.

Yes, the tutorial/general introduction to the game is definitely the roughest part. The game, being a unique/gimmicky puzzle game, can take a moment to wrap your head around at first. This is partly why I made the tutorial as verbose as it is. Think of it more like the included instruction book rather than a quick tutorial. It's the full, unskippable documentation.

I certainly WANT to improve the tutorial in some way. If I had to do this again, I'd something along the lines of making a short interactive tutorial to just quickly introduce you to the game, and then have the rest of the text stored in a separate in game handbook. Quickstart & full documentation.

I ultimately decided to leave the tutorial as-is. Since this is more of a demo for a true Viva Hexagon! game, I didn't spend too much time on the tutorial. For example, something I really want to do is a single player arcade mode/campaign, like what Puyo-Puyo has. This is something I want to tie tutorial into in some way or another (even just stuff like quick tips between stages). Not being able to do this in the current state of Viva Hexagon! (No arcade mode) definitely made me spend less time on the tutorial than I probably should have.

The tutorial is also just the most difficult code to work with, since it's very fragile. I realized the flaws with the tutorial, but just couldn't be bothered to fix them in this release of the game.

TL;DR yeah, I'm aware of how overwhelming the tutorial is. Thanks for the feedback!

[Madness: Fueled By Hotdogs]

Wow, really impressive stuff here! Really gives me Severed Steel vibes with the way you've setup these really fun and frantic firefights where you're constantly on your toes, diving through gunfire and grabbing whatever guns you can get your hands on when you've run dry. The Madness vibes are great as well with all the cool gore, varied executions, and tons of weapons to try out. I also liked some of the crazy systems in play, like getting tac bar back if you dive through gunfire, making effective use of it very rewarding. Again, really neat stuff!

Unfortunately, while I think that the game is pretty cool, I'd say it is more cool in how it has loads of potential, as its current setup is just way too rough and unrefined:

*While it starts out alright, as the game went on it felt like combat was just way too fast and confusing to keep track of. The combination of enemies suddenly being able to spawn out from monster closets wherever and whenever, enemies always being aggressively locked right onto you and firing undodgeable hitscan weapons, the player getting practically no feedback from damage (especially tac bar damage compared to health), not being able to keep track of enemies positions through things like footsteps which are absent, and so on and so forth made a lot of fights frustrating messes where you just get constantly killed before you realize and can't do anything except trial-and-error memorization.

*Diving could've been the savior of the combat here, especially since it looked like you were going in the right direction with being rewarded for good dives and making it possible to tactically chain them together. But without slow-mo for a dive, it felt pointless as it was impossible to get any accurate shots off during, and despite always trying to dive through shots, it didn't feel reliable to get the tac bar reward, leaving me unfairly high and dry. The worse part as well was how absolutely terrible it felt to hit space and C to dive: just make it its own button for gods sake, like shift!

*There was also tons of jank with the game. For example, ammo counters were incredibly unreliable as it seems like they don't update until you fire the gun: whenever I picked up ammo from the ground or picked up a dual wield weapon or swapped from a dual wield weapon to a new single one, the old ammo counters would remain what they were before until I fired, making me think I had more or less ammo than I did. Not ideal for frantic firefights like this where every bullet counts and I need to know what I have! Weapon management was annoying as well: when you run out of ammo for dual wields, why can't I throw my weapons like I do for single guns? Is there a way I can swap back to single from dual? And so on and so forth.

*Also it felt like the game lost the whole central hotdog mechanic? Felt like it was so important initially before being thrown away. It's ok as a gag but the idea of having to tactically use these 'berserk' powerups could be iterated upon.

*There's also the fact that the camera can bug out and turn way more than you wanted at times: I don't think its necessarily an issue on your part through as lots of these HTML FPS games have this bug for some reason or other.

I really do want to love this game: I think it has loads of potential to become a Madness version of Severed Steel or Trepang2 or so on, but the general combat is just too awkward and unrefined at the moment. If the inventory/ammo management was fixed, slow-mo was added to dives, enemy AI and spawning was refined, and so on, I think this would be some top shelf stuff. Please continue to polish this up as I want this to be great!

frdy responds:

Thank you for the detailed feedback! This was exactly what I was looking for. I'm struggling with the control scheme, since there's a big balancing act with keeping as few keybinds as necessary while maximizing the amount of control players have. A dedicated dive button is a super common request.
Dual weapons are a very tricky design problem. I had many ideas for how running empty with them should be handled.
At one point, I created an animation for switching the gun in your left hand to the one in your right hand if you ran out of ammo for the right gun. If I wanted to retain all of the features of single guns (bashing, turning into a melee weapon when empty), that'd require an entire new set of animations and a lot of extra programming, which I didn't have time for.
If having one empty gun while you're dual wielding were to let you bash/throw while you could still control the loaded gun as normal, there'd have to be a choice -- have the respective mouse button either bash or throw.
I think I just rubberducked. Letting you throw the empty gun would work.

Would you like to join my development discord server? https://discord.gg/DVprYTP8p
I seriously appreciate any sort of blunt feedback.

[Madness Combat - The Sheriff Clones]

Hmm, this unfortunately felt quite rough to me.

It definitely had a pretty solid first impression, as the general gunplay, gore, weapon swapping and so on seemed great: felt and looked pretty smooth and well-animated, and it was very satisfying and fun to blow people away with guns and watch their gibs and blood fly all over the place. Certainly feels like you've built a decent core array of assets.

However, while the game showed a lot of potential initially, the gameplay itself very quickly just ended up feeling very bland, simple and repetitive, making it all feel like a very style over substance situation.

Once you play the game for a minute or so, it felt like you've seen everything it has to offer. It just felt so tiresome to run around this maze chasing these Sheriff clones, spamming the dodge button over and over to keep up with them. The world felt so dry and annoying to navigate, and the way enemies were spaced out made the flow of combat very awkward: sometimes you'd have huge patches of time with no action, then suddenly you get this mass of enemies all bundled together. It looks like the game might have a clown boss later on, but I just didn't have the patience to get there.

Upgrades were very boring as well, not only being the same three things but they didn't add anything to the gameplay and were typically so minor as to be unnoticeable. As enemies start to get guns later on, combat gets more annoying since the cramped corridors combined with the fast bullets means dodging is practically impossible and you just take so much chip damage, especially since you need to chase the Sheriff.

Melee feels absolutely terrible. I can understand having melee be a bit weak to drive the player towards seeking out guns, but even if that was the case, it's just too rough here. The range is so short n' stubby and there's no stun/knockback for hitting people so you frustratingly can't deal damage without taking damage, making it feel pointless.

The game also had a bunch of glitches, such as invincible enemies that would phase through walls for some reason or other.

Again, it has a lot of potential for some good Madness-style shooting action as it does a lot of things right in terms of combat, but the core gameplay loop of chasing Sheriffs around this maze just made wore me down and bored me quickly: with a better world and more interesting objectives/events, I believe this could be very nice.

Aalasteir responds:

Thank you, your thoughts are greatly appreciated and insightful.